Every teacher has seen students get frustrated and give up. Struggle is a healthy experience for students, but they don’t always realize that it’s an integral part of the learning process. One teacher in New York City has found a way to connect productive struggle to something very familiar to students, and is using this… Read More

Every school, district, and teacher has their own version of the lesson plan. Some are quite formal while others may be a loose listing of bullet points. The usual stuff like standards, do-nows, and exit tickets are great, but here are some other ideas for what to include in a lesson plan to maximize student… Read More

Every teacher, every year, has at least one student who utters those heartbreaking words: “I just don’t like school.” These words are uttered by the student who says they “just want to be left alone,” and who is resigned to get through their education with as little effort and bother as possible. But what are… Read More

How many five-paragraph essays do students write in their school career? A lot. How many standardized tests require an essay? Most of them. How many essays will students need to write after college? Eh, probably not that many. Essays have their function, but they’re certainly not the only academically rigorous form of writing, nor are… Read More

Teaching via stations or learning centers feels familiar to elementary school teachers, but offering them in middle school may not feel entirely comfortable at first glance. I used to occasionally utilize stations to cover specific content very quickly but after I heard Catlin Tucker speak at a professional development seminar, I realized the potential impact I could… Read More

Educators have gotten very good at building scaffolds for student learning, but are we going too far? Are we underestimating our students’ ability to struggle and then succeed? When is it time to step back? Should every assignment have scaffolds? Let’s explore if and when differentiation and scaffolding should take a backseat to healthy learning… Read More

Brighten up the dark and chilly days of winter with some hands-on tinkering, experimenting, and creating — in the classroom or at home. Check out these totally doable STEAM projects that put winter weather and winter challenges to the test so that students are inspired to collaborate and think critically and creatively during the winter… Read More

I recently explained my strategies for structuring a class so that students would have a sense of its direction and purpose. In this entry, I will focus on how to fill class time with learning activities designed specifically for adults by using a personal example. Background on adult learners Before discussing ways to keep adults… Read More

Most teachers have, at some point, looked out over their class and noticed that, despite their best efforts, the students seemed disengaged. No matter at what level of the curriculum you teach, holding your students’ attention can be one the most difficult aspect of instruction, especially in today’s media-permeated classrooms. Keeping adult learners interested can… Read More

STEM has been a priority in many U.S. schools for at least a decade but, in the past few years, education experts have noticed that something was missing — that future scientists and engineers also need soft skills like creativity, collaboration, and communication to solve problems. “We realized that language arts, social studies, and visual… Read More

Schools across the nation are doing some amazing interdisciplinary project-based learning. There are tons of impactful ways to meld skills and content-areas together in unique pairings. Novels in math class? Experiments in English? Poems in history? Why not? Who says that subjects have to stay separate? Here are some fun ways to mix it up… Read More

Educational terminology can be overwhelming with so many acronyms and buzzwords to remember. So we’ve created a must-know list of education lingo for your reference. 1:1: One laptop or device for each student in a class or school. For more on this, check out 8 Strategies to Manage the 21st Century Classroom. 21st-Century Skills: A… Read More

How often do you or your students think about agriculture? Where your food comes from? How it grows? Who grows it? What decisions go into how it is grown? Maybe you think about it a lot. But maybe your answer is closer to never. Well, if you are a STEAM educator you are missing out… Read More

Instructional design (ID) can sometimes be an overly complicated and diverse field with various instructional design models and complicated terminology. But I’ve always found that instructional design can be simplified if you stick to a few important principles and ask yourself a small number of intuitive questions. Instructional design: What does it mean? Simply put:… Read More